HOMEBREW Digest #158 Wed 24 May 1989

FORUM ON BEER, HOMEBREWING, AND RELATED ISSUES
Rob Gardner, Digest Coordinator
Contents:MEAD-ANDERINGS (ROSS)Re: short boil OK? (Pete Soper)Lagering (was Re: Sam Adams Doppelbock) (Rick Noah Zucker)Bud Bashing (was Reinheitsgebot) (lbr)Sam Adams (uiucdcs!att!iwtio!korz)re: refrigeration (Darryl Richman)
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Date: Tue, 23 May 89 09:21 EDT
From: ROSS at mscf.med.upenn.edu
Subject: MEAD-ANDERINGS
Date sent: 23-MAY-1989 09:15:30
I have a great interest in mead and recently saw a mention of a
publication called MEAD-ANDERINGS. Does anybody know the address of this
magazine?
For the longest time I have wanted to brew something resembling
Belgium's Chimay Trappist beer but haven't seen any recipes. If anybody
has any all-extract recipes for this brew, I'd really like to give it a
try. Thanks.
--- Andy Ross ---
University of Pennsylvania
Medical School Computer Facility
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Date: Tue, 23 May 89 13:17:11 edt
From: Pete Soper <soper at maxzilla.encore.com>
Subject: Re: short boil OK?
>From: prcrs!bstar4!qa at uunet.UU.NET (John Link):
>This gentleman stated that he felt that single stage was better and the
>goal was to reduce the amount of trub formed. He stated that if you
>limit your boil to 20 minutes their would not be as much chance for the
>protein to coagulate; thus less trub.
>Does this sound reasonable? Has anyone used this method and if so
This does not sound reasonable to me. If you don't coagulate that
protein and other stuff out of your beer you are going to leave it in
your beer, right? Right. And what will those whopping big molecules
look like? They will look like the haze in Mexico City. But the kicker
is that this stuff is going to be in very intimate contact with the
beer during fermentation (and forever after), allowing for the weird
chemistry and other hazards (infection!) that you wanted to avoid by
racking off the trub after primary fermentation. A 20 minute boil is
also too short to get proper bitterness and other good effects from
your hops. There are other problems, but you get the idea. The bottom
line is that you would not mistake a beer made this way for one you are
used to buying. Boil the wort as vigorously as you can for around 60
minutes as Miller, Burch, and the wise other heads in the literature
recommend.
On the other hand, while I feel strongly that you should get the big
molecules settled out of your wort, I feel that at this stage in your
homebrew career you should not worry *at all* about trub sitting in
your fermenter for a week or two. Sitting in the fermenter, most of the
trub is covered with a yeast cake most of the time anyway. Get experience
with maintaining immaculate sanitation levels while racking (at bottling
time) before you rack just for the sake of racking off the trub. Then when
you've gotten everything under control and are looking for things to refine,
return to this subject.
>could you pass on a recipe? Budweiser, Bass, Heiniken (sp?) are beers
>I typically purchase.
I'd love to, but I'm doing all grain stuff that would be worthless to
you at this point. I think you would have best luck copying Bass first.
Or you could start with Burch's "bitter" recipe. This was the basis of my
third and fourth batches and was a great leap forward from the beer kits
I'd brought back from England.
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Pete Soper +1 919 481 3730
arpa: soper at encore.com uucp: {bu-cs,decvax,necntc}!encore!soper
Encore Computer Corp, 901 Kildaire Farm Rd, bldg D, Cary, NC 27511 USA
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Date: Tue, 23 May 89 10:38:57 PDT
From: noah at june.cs.washington.edu (Rick Noah Zucker)
Subject: Lagering (was Re: Sam Adams Doppelbock)
The word lager means to store in german. The reason this beer
style is called lager (which applies to all bottom fermented beers) is
that it was stored (lagered) in caves that were colder than above ground
temperatures. This allowed bottom fermentation to be used.
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Date: Tue, 23 May 89 14:36:49 EDT
From: holos0!lbr at gatech.edu
Subject: Bud Bashing (was Reinheitsgebot)
In #154 florianb%tekred.cna.tek.com at RELAY.CS.NET writes:
> I believe more important than the ingredients are the contents of
> the brewing water and the brewing process. I hold that one reason
> why American beers are so awful is that strict attention is not
> paid to the proper temperature processes during the brewing.
> This leads to nasties developed in the fermentation that come back
> to haunt you after drinking.
When I first started homebrewing, in 1979, there was a lot of Bud-bashing
in homebrewing circles. Many folks claimed that on your first try
you could make beer superior to Bud or Coors using malt syrup, lots
of added sugar, dried ale yeast, no water analysis, boiling only part
of the wort, high fermenation temperatures, and little temperature control.
There was lots of talk about how awful commercial American beers were.
Worst of all, the occasional (or not-too-occasional) batch of bad homebrew
was referred to as "tasting like Budweiser." Yeah, right. You don't hear
much of this silly macho talk any more, thank God.
If you don't like Budweiser, it means you don't like its *style*.
A-B has far better control over their beer than any homebrewer could
ever have. Do you have a microbiology laboratory? Exact control over
mash temperatures? Detailed analysis of every ingredient? The
ability to test hop acids yourself? Do you really believe that the
major American breweries risk their multi-billion dollar businesses
by using insufficient temperature control at any stage?
American breweries do, in general, ferment at higher temperatures than
the Germans--54 degrees instead of 48, say. They also use different
yeasts and far different ingredients. This adds up to radically different
beer. But to claim that A-B doesn't pay attention to *any* aspect of
brewing is laughable.
A homebrewer can beat A-B for beer style any day. All you have to do
is get some good malt and hops and not be afraid to use them. You can
even beat good imported beer (with considerable effort) because of
your freshness. But nearly all homebrew has minor flaws that would be
unacceptable to a brewery: diacytal, oxidation, haze, etc. Those of us
trying to rid ourselves of the last of these problems still can't
make beer with brewery-like consistency, though I don't care if there
are minor differences from batch to batch.
And now for legitimate A-B bashing. Who the hell wants a beer with
"no aftertaste"? What kind of sicko would come up with such a thing?
What's next--Carbernet Sauvignon with no aftertaste?
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Date: Tue, 23 May 89 14:02:22 CDT
From: hplabs!uiucdcs!att!iwtio!korz
Subject: Sam Adams
Not that this is a big deal or anything, but just to fit another
piece in this Sam Adams puzzle: Sam Adams is available at Osco
in the Chicago area. (I'm not sure how many of you are familiar with
Osco stores, which are pretty popular here in the Chicago Metro area.
Osco is a large variety/drugstore affiliated with Jewel foodstores
(they even share buildings). The reason I mention this is because
it's a very "everyday" place to buy beer, as opposed to going to the
connoisseur section of a liquor store.)
I have tried Sam Adams and I really like it. I haven't tried that many
microbrewery beers, but Boston Lager is one of the few lagers made in
the U.S. that actually has some body, aroma, and bouquet.
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Date: Tue, 23 May 89 12:52:41 PDT
From: Darryl Richman <darryl at ism780c.isc.com>
Subject: re: refrigeration
From: ferguson%X102C at HARRIS-ATD.COM (ferguson ct 71078)
">From: Darryl Richman <darryl at ism780c.isc.com>
">Subject: re: Sam Adams
"> The bold print says "Sam Adams
">Was An Ale Drinker!" Of course, lager beer was unknown before the 1840's--
">it's a creation of mechanized refrigeration.
" ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ ?????
"I have no idea when lager was first brewed or whether it was a product
"of mechanical refrigeration. However, I have seen or heard of several
"old breweries that were located in caves (sometimes man-made) because
"of the cooler temperatures there and I always assumed that the beer
"brewed in these caves was a lager or lager/ale hybrid. For example,
"the now defunct Wolf brewery in Stillwater, MN was in a man-made cave
"carved into a solid limestone rock at what must have been considerable
"expense. If these caves were not for lagering, what the heck were
"they for?
True enough that caves were used. Lager brewing actually depended on
two coincident scientific advancements that occured in the decade of
1835-1845. I haven't got an encyclopaedia here, sadly, but the first
was (Carl?) Linde's invention of mechanical refrigeration (using
ammonia, I believe). The other was the culturing of yeast from single
cells, which allowed brewers for the first time to acquire true
strains. Most of this work occured at the Carlsberg brewery (hence the
name of lager yeast, until recently, Saccharomyces Carlsbergensis).
Once you have true strains, you have to figure out which one(s) to use,
and it was discovered that some strains flocced to the bottom of the
fermenter.
So, back to the caves... Before refrigeration, beer would go sour in
short order if left warm. Caves were convenient because they held
their cool temperature relatively constant throughout the year. When
it got too warm to brew in the summer, the brewers would knock off til
fall. The Oktoberfest was predated by another festival to celebrate
the first new beer of the year; the fest would drain the dregs of last
spring's beer. In a sense, beer was lagered long before Linde, but the
yeasts used were ale yeasts, with their fruity overtones and higher
esters and alcohols. After Linde and Carlsberg, it was possible to
consistently make smooth, crisp, clean beers year round.
The older style of German beer still exists today, although it is
dwarfed by the lager output. This style is Altbier, old fashioned
beer. It is brewed in the Rhine valley, where they don't take to ideas
from Bavaria and Denmark easily.
--Darryl Richman
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